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Server provisioning: What Network Admins

and IT Pros need to know
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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

What you will learn

This document is designed to help

system administrators and DevOps focused
Organisations to understand bare metal server
provisioning, understand its value proposition,
and learn about how leading companies are
using server provisioning solutions within their
hyperscale environments. Canonical addresses
these requirements with the open source
utility MAAS (Metal as a Service).

This solution helps Organisations to take full

advantage of existing hardware investments
by maximising hardware efficiency, and a
pathway to leverage the performance and
security of hardware based solutions with
the economics and efficiencies of the cloud.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

About the author

Christopher Wilder has domain expertise in Cloud

Computing and Infrastructure, the Internet of
Things (IoT), machine learning, business Analytics,
networking, communications, and software
defined infrastructure.

Chris is the author of the book Big Software Has

Arrived, and the co-author of the best-seller,
Influencing the Influencers. Chris is a frequent
contributor to Forbes and TechTarget. He has
also published multiple columns on software
and technologies in The New York Times, Boston
Globe, CEO Magazine, and others. He serves
on TechTargets Cloud Advisory board, and Christopher Wilder
is a trusted advisor for dozens of technology Content Marketing, Canonical
companies worldwide.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

Contents

Executive summary 05

Cloud speed with bare metal 08

reliability and efficiency

Get the most out of your 11

hardware investment

How the smartest IT Pros let 13

software do the work

Make hardware investments 17

more strategic

Conclusion 18

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Executive summary
As Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, once
famously said of cloud All it is, is a computer
attached to a network. Larry and Oracle have
since embraced cloud technologies such as
OpenStack yet the basic premise that it starts
with a physical server and a network still holds
true. Organisations wishing to run a cloud on
premises need to master bare metal servers
and networking and this is causing a major
transition in the datacenter.
Big Software, IoT (Internet of Things), and Big
Data are changing how operators must architect
and deploy and managed servers and networks.
The traditional Enterprise scale-up models of
delivering monolithic software on a limited
number of big machines are being replaced by
scale-out solutions that are deployed across
many environments on many servers.
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5
This shift has forced data centre operators to Big Software is the key driver forcing
look to alternative methods of operation that Organisations to focus on tools and models to
can deliver huge scale while reducing costs. deploy and manage workloads and applications
spread across scaled-out environments, including
As the pendulum swings, scale-out represents disparate data centre and cloud environments.
a major shift in how data centres are deployed All the while, optimising components within
today. This approach presents a more agile and distributed, often hyper-converged hardware
flexible way to drive value to cloud deployments environments.
while reducing overhead and operational costs.
Scale-out is driven by a new era of software
(web, Hadoop, Mongodb, ELK, NoSQL, etc.)
that enables Organisations to take advantage
of hardware efficiencies whilst leveraging
existing or new infrastructure to automate
and scale machines and cloud-based workloads
across distributed, heterogeneous environments.
This next generation of software brings new
automation and deployment tools, efficiencies,
and methods for deploying distributed systems
in the cloud.
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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

Scale-up: Scale-Out: However, no matter what infrastructure you

have, there are bare metal machines under
it, somewhere. When rolling out data centre
deployments, companies need a tool that can
provision everything they need, while working
with the infrastructure they have. For private
infrastructure to thrive in the cloud era, it must
be agile and efficient.

In the data centre, Organisations had

significant friction with the onboarding,
provisioning, and management of their
physical hardware. This is, in large part, why
Virtual Machines (VMs) became popular.

As VMs appeared and evolved within the

data centre, enterprises moved from purpose-
configured applications designated for
specific hardware configurations to more
general solutions designed to work within a
Scale-up vs. Scale-out virtual machine environment.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

Hardware has always been an expensive and Organisations are looking for more efficient MAAS is trusted by
difficult resource to deploy within a data centre, ways to balance their hardware and infrastructure
but is unfortunately still a major consideration investments with the efficiencies of the cloud.
for any organisation moving all or part of their Canonicals MAAS (Metal As A Service) is such
infrastructure to the cloud. a technology. MAAS is effectively a hardware
API that turns bare metal servers into its own
To become more cost-effective, Organisations cloud, without virtual machines. MAAS is
hire teams of developers to cobble together designed for devops at scale, in places where
software solutions that solve functional bare metal is the best way to run your app.
business challenges while leveraging existing Big data, private cloud, PAAS and HPC all
legacy hardware in the hopes of offsetting thrive on MAAS.
the need to buy and deploy more hardware-
based solutions. VMs require a hypervisor,
which enables streamlined operations through
software, but managing the hardware itself
remains a painful journey through proprietary
APIs and often incompletely-implemented
specifications like Distributed Management
Task Forces IPMI (intelligent platform
management interface).

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Cloud speed with bare metal
reliability and efficiency
MAAS allows operators to deploy physical
hardware as opposed to virtual environments.
Within the service there are common
technologies like PXE (preboot execution
environment) and IPMI to ensure interoperability
and support for a range of hardware. MAAS
makes it easy to provision physical servers as
easily as deploying a virtual machine in the
cloud with full programmatic control over the
hardware and its capabilities. Further, MAAS
works across all vendors and operating systems
including Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat
and Suse.
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MAAS is the fastest way
to deploy operating systems
8
MAAS isnt a new concept, but demand and
adoption rates are growing because many
enterprises want to combine the flexibility
of cloud services with the raw power of bare
metal servers to run high-power, scalable
workloads. MAAS, however, is a new way of
thinking about physical infrastructure and
how Organisations can leverage the best of
all worlds. This is especially true for compute,
storage, and networking as they have become
commodities in the virtual world. MAAS lets
enterprises treat farms of servers as malleable
resources for dynamic allocation to specific
areas within the ecosystem.
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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

MAAS is much like any XaaS business model MAAS is the fastest way
dedicated to a specific tenant, but the main
difference is customers choose the type of
to deploy operating systems
compute configuration they want in their servers
(e.g. x86, single dual, quad core processors)
combined with applicable storage, memory,
and other functionality. Applications and
workloads are deployed onto servers that
have the sufficient compute power, storage,
and an operating system that allows for
optimal performance and efficiency.

Search for more supported hardware on our partner portal.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

For example, when a new server needs to be

deployed, MAAS automates most, if not all, of
the provisioning process. Automation makes
deploying solutions much quicker and more
efficient because it allows tedious tasks to be
performed faster and more accurately without
human intervention.

Even with proper and thorough documentation,

manually deploying server to run web services
or Hadoop, for example, could take hours
compared to a few minutes with MAAS. This
is why IT Pros are looking at MAAS as a way to
make the most effective use of their teams
precious resources and time. Moreover, MAAS
provides a uniform way to provide a hyperscale
environment for admins and users to load
applications onto servers via their preferred
automation tool, i.e. Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
Juju etc.

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MAAS Region Controller (regiond)

Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Get the most out of your
hardware investment
Every IT department has made significant
investments in hardware. However, as the
cloud has disrupted traditional business models,
IT Pros needed to find a way to combine the
flexibility of the cloud with the power and
security of their bare metal servers. Canonicals
MAAS solution allows IT Organisations to
discover, commission, and deploy physical
servers within any cloud environment.
As new services and applications are deployed,
MAAS can dynamically re-allocate physical
resources to match cloud-based workload
requirements. This means Organisations can
deploy both virtual and physical machines
across multiple architectures and virtual
environments, at scale.
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MAAS was designed to make complex These Organisations found their tools were
hardware deployments faster, more efficient, outdated thereby prohibiting them from
and with more flexibility. While there are many deploying large numbers of servers. Server
use cases, below are a few segments that have deployments were slow, modular/monolithic,
found success. and could not integrate with tools, drivers,
and APIs. By deploying MAAS they were able
to speed-up their server deployment times
High Performance
as well as integrate with their orchestration
Computing (HPC): platform and configuration management
tools like Chef, Ansible, and Puppet, or
HPC relies on aggregating computing power software modeling solutions like Juju.
to solve large data-centric problems in subjects
like health care, engineering, business, science,
etc. Many large Organisations are leveraging
MAAS to modernise their OS deployment
toolchain (a set of tool integrations that support
development, deployment, and operations
tasks) and lower server provisioning time.

Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Smart Data Centers
Servers installed within a data centre typically
serves a single purpose for the duration of its
life. Smart data centres enable the full utilisation
of hardware, thus improving the total cost of
ownership (TCO). With MAAS, smart data centre
operators like Walmart and Box can quickly
power off a server and install a different OS for
a few hours to perform different tasks. MAAS
enables multi purpose server usage which
improves efficiency and doesnt let servers
go underutilised.
For example, banks typically use full server
power during their normal work hours, taking
in requests from customers (e.g. web banking).
During low volume traffic, unutilised server
power can be redeployed dynamically to do
perform other tasks e.g. fraud detection, batch
processing, etc. To make this process completely
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automatic an orchestration tool is required, their infrastructure via private cloud. However,
but MAAS ensures the reallocation is done during peak demand times they require
quickly. extra support via public cloud providers like
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and
Google Cloud Platform. Canonicals Juju works
Hybrid Cloud
seamlessly between each environment to
ensure communications between public cloud
In a hybrid cloud environment, which is an
APIs and the organisations private cloud (i.e
environment that leverages on-premise
OpenStack). In some cases, the private cloud
or private cloud infrastructure with public
needs to run from bare metal servers (i.e.
cloud utilising orchestration tools or service
Hadoop). In those cases, the only possible way
modeling solutions, MAAS optimises and
to interface at that level is with MAAS, which
unifies operations. MAAS exposes bare-metal
provides an API that allows administrators
server provisioning operations and an API
and users to provision solutions like a VM.
(application programming interface) that can
be consumed by service modeling solutions
Each of these examples demonstrates how
like Canonicals Juju as the building blocks for
forward-thinking Organisations are using
an optimised hybrid cloud.
MAAS and other technologies to take full
advantage of their infrastructure investments.
As an example, many large enterprises that
rely on transactions as a major part of their
business model (retail, airlines, etc.) manage

Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
How the smartest IT Pros let
software do the work
MAAS acts as an abstraction layer between the
management layer and the underlying physical
hardware. MAAS also can discover existing
hardware resources and automate many
management tasks, including:
Installing, configuring, and monitoring bare
metal hardware. Including but not limited to,
servers, switches, power distribution units
(PDU)/mains distribution units (MDU), and
Data Acquisition Engines (DAE), etc.
Install and upgrade firmware, patches,
and updates
A
 utomated server utilisation and
re-utilisation based on need
D
 iscovery of compute, network, capabilities,
and storage based on server
Power on and off servers as needed
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By automating these functions MAAS eliminates Physical availability zones
the extensive manual process required for
traditional server operations and allows In keeping with the notion of a physical
Organisations to become more operationally cloud MAAS lets you designate machines
efficient. as belonging to a particular availability zone. It
is typical to group sets of machines by rack or
room or building into an availability zone based
Making MAAS Work
on common points of failure. The natural
boundaries of a zone depend largely on the
MAAS has a tiered architecture with a central
scale of deployment and the design of physical
postgres database backing a Region Controller
interconnects in the data centre.
(regiond) that deals with operator requests.
Distributed Rack Controllers (rackd) provide
Nevertheless the effect is to be able to
high-bandwidth services to multiple racks. The
a scale-out service across multiple failure
controller itself is stateless and horizontally
domains very easily, just as you would expect
scalable, presenting only a REST API.
on a public cloud. Higher-level infrastructure
offerings like OpenStack or Mesos can present
Rack Controller (rackd) provides DHCP, IPMI,
that information to their API clients as well,
PXE, TFTP and other local services. They cache
enabling very straightforward deployment of
large items like operating system install images
sophisticated solutions from metal to container.
at the rack level for performance but maintain
no exclusive state other than credentials to talk
to the controller.
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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

The MAAS API allows for discovery of the zones

in the region. Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Juju can
transparently spread services across the available
zones. Users can also specifically request
machines in particular Availability Zones.

There is no forced correlation between a machine

location in a particular rack and the zone in which
MAAS will present it, nor is there a forced
correlation between network segment and
rack. In larger deployments it is common for
traffic to be routed between zones, in smaller
deployments the switches are often trunked
allowing subnets to span zones.

By convention, users are entitled to assume that

MAAS physical availability zones all zones in a region are connected with very
high bandwidth that is not metered, enabling
them to use all zones equally and spread
deployments across as many zones as they
choose for availability purposes.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

The node lifecycle

Each machine (node) managed by MAAS goes
through a lifecycle from its enlistment or
onboarding to MAAS, through commissioning
when we inventory and can setup firmware or
other hardware-specific elements, then allocation
to a user and deployment, and finally they are
released back to the pool or retired altogether.

MAAS high availability

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
New
New machines which PXE-boot on a MAAS
network will be enlisted automatically if MAAS
can detect their BMC parameters. The easiest
way to enlist standard IPMI servers is simply
to PXE-boot them on the MAAS network.
Commissioning
Detailed inventory of RAM, CPU, disks,
NICs, specific models, serial numbers, and
accelerators like GPUs itemised and usable as
constraints for machine selection. It is possible
to run your own scripts for site-specific tasks
such as firmware updates.
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Ready
A machine that is successfully commissioned
is considered Ready. It will have configured
BMC credentials (on IPMI based BMCs) for
ongoing power control, ensuring that MAAS
can start or stop the machine and allocate or
(re)deploy it with a fresh operating system.
Allocated
Ready machines can be allocated to users,
who can configure network interface bonding
and addressing, and disks, such as LVM, RAID,
bcache or partitioning.
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Deploying
Users then can ask MAAS to turn the machine
on and install a complete server operating
system from scratch without any manual
intervention, configuring network interfaces,
disk partitions and more.
Releasing
When a user has finished with the machine,
they can release it back to the shared pool
of capacity. You can ask MAAS to ensure that
there is a full disk-wipe of the machine when
that happens.

Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Making hardware investments work
Systems must be configured to ensure maximum
throughput and service delivery. Because each
application has different demands and resource
utilisation, many Organisations tend to over-build
to compensate for peak-load, or they will over-
provision VMs to ensure enough capacity years
out. With MAAS, todays IT Pros no longer have
to perform capacity planning five-years out.
Instead, they can develop strategies for creating
differently configured hardware and cloud
archetypes to cover all classes of applications
within their current environment and existing
IT investments.
MAAS makes it possible for Organisations to
make the most of their hardware by enabling
hardware to reprovision systems for the needs
of the data centre. For example, a server used
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for transcoding video 20 minutes ago is now a
Kubernetes worker node, later a Hadoop Map-
Reduce node, and tomorrow something else
entirely.
One of the often overlooked components
to scale-out are the tools and techniques
for leveraging bare metal servers within the
environment. What happens in the next 3-5
years will determine how end-to-end solutions
are architected for the next several decades.
OpenStack has provided an alternative to
public cloud. Containers have brought new
efficiencies and functionality over traditional
VM models, and service modeling brings new
flexibility and agility to both enterprises and
service providers, while leveraging existing
hardware infrastructure investments to deliver
application functionality more effectively.
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Further, by complementing MAAS with Juju, IT
Organisations can leverage bundles of Charms
(sets of encapsulated code for deploying and
managing services) to automatically deploy
and configure various server software stacks
and applications functionality. Juju integrates
seamlessly with MAAS, making it possible to
centrally deploy software to the hardware nodes
in a server cluster. Using MAAS and Juju together
can significantly reduce the difficulty deploying
an OpenStack private cloud, thereby increasing
time to market.
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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know

Conclusion Get started with MAAS

To download and install MAAS for free please visit
ubuntu.com/download/server/provisioning
The industry is at a pivotal period, transitioning
from traditional scale-up models of the past
to scale-out architecture of the future where Or to talk to one of our scale-out experts about
solutions are delivered on disparate clouds,
machines, and environments simultaneously.
deploying MAAS in your datacenter contact us at
IT customers need to have the flexibility of not ubuntu.com/about/contact-us/form
ripping and replacing their entire infrastructure
to take advantage of the opportunities the cloud
offers. This is why new architectures and business
models are emerging. Canonicals MAAS is a
mature solution to help Organisations to take
full advantage of their cloud and legacy
hardware investments.

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Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
About Canonical
At Canonical, we are passionate about
the potential of open source software to
transform business. For over a decade, we
have supported the development of Ubuntu
and promoted its adoption in the enterprise.
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By providing custom engineering, support
contracts and training, we help clients in the
telecoms and IT services industries to cut
costs, improve efficiency and tighten security
with Ubuntu and OpenStack. We work with
hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell and
Intel, to ensure the software we create can be
delivered on the worlds most popular devices.
And we contribute thousands of man-hours
every year to projects like OpenStack, to
ensure that the worlds best open source
software continues to fulfil its potential.